Plans Work in Mysterious Ways: Evaluating a Plan Mode for Spreadsheet Agents

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.23670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Plan Modes have become standard features in agentic programming tools, allowing users to gain transparency and control by working with the agent to develop a plan before task execution. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of this feature translate to end-user programming environments such as spreadsheets. Since spreadsheet programmers tend to work iteratively and care less about technical correctness, upfront planning may not fit into their workflows as easily. In this paper, we build a prototype of a Plan Mode for spreadsheet programming and evaluate it against a non-planning baseline through a within-subjects user study (N=24). We found that despite similar task outcomes with both tools, using Plan Mode led to a reduc